General Consultant Discussion

Has anyone here used MS SQL Server Reporting Services via a programmatic interface? Specifically, we want to call a SSRS report and feed it parameters from a web application. Basically the client has a web page that gathers some info and then it needs to feed it to SSRS to filter and drive report results. Any one do that and can help out with some information?

I'm bumping this. Hopefully a MS SQL guru in 90 Minds can help out?

If you web deploy the SSRS reports you should be able to link to them from the web page in your app. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19736398/passing-parameters-to-a-report-in-ssrs-but-no-report I know just enough about SSRS to appreciate Crystal...

LOL - thanks Phil. This customer is committed to using SSRS despite the fact that they know nothing about it. Sheesh ... Any other folks in the 90 Minds brain trust have any experience with SSRS?

We are ripping our hair out here. Epicor has used Crystal forever. For whatever reason, now they see SAP as a competitor (but Microsoft not???) and are moving to SSRS for Epicor 10. Everything is literally 5-10x more complex for doing this that were oh so simple in crystal.

That's really interesting to know. Do you think it's because you are more familiar with Crystal from using it so long or is it that SSRS is horrible?

SSRS report designer is NOT WYSIWIG!!! Resizing one ""cell"" can resize others. Can't use if-then-else - have to use IIF and nesting those is so much trickier... have to reenter parameters each time you run the report... and many more...

That's pretty pathetic for a report writer!

It's 'free'...thats' what you get. It seems Microsoft hasn't done squat with it in a while. Architecturally SSRS is more modern in that the reports are generated on the server and can be viewed via browser. With crystal, if you don't want client side runtimes and processing, you have to get into their really expensive and much more complex to install Server solutions.